Hi all. This may be old news to the smart people out there, but a couple of
recent experiments surprised me, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to share my
results. I made a simple movie script handler that looks like this:

on SpeedTest
theTime = the milliseconds
repeat with i = 1 to 50000
(do something)
end repeat
put the milliseconds - theTime
end

The thing I wasn't expecting is that pre-defining a variable as a model
reference is amazingly faster than not doing so. Let me illustrate:

on SpeedTest
theTime = the milliseconds
theModel = member("3d").model("some model")
repeat with i = 1 to 50000
this = theModel.getWorldTransform()
end repeat
put the milliseconds - theTime
end

When I use member("3d").model("some model") within the repeat loop it gets
VERY slow. I just didn't see that coming. Further, using model("some model")
is around twice as fast as using the model's index number like this: model[2]

Finally, I was just winging this, so if there's something fishy about my
methodology, or something isn't adding up, let me know. In short, I highly
recomend trying out something like this. You might be surprised how much you
can improve your frame rate with a few simple changes.